The Human Resources Manager (***)

In this unusual road movie, a burned-out Israeli HR rep finds himself unexpectedly involved in a family saga half a world away. Ostensibly, the manager is trying to honor an employee killed in a suicide bombing, but burials are always about the living, not the dead. Shot mostly in Romania, the film mixes light comedy, light melodrama, and a bit of adventure in a very picturesque manner.

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Viewed 4/13/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Cinefest] and reviewed 4/13/11

Goodbye Solo (***)

Solo is a Senegalese cabbie in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in the first scene, agrees to take a cranky old white guy on a long, one-way trip to a mountaintop, a few weeks in the future. The two-character drama, not the light plot, is the draw here. Gregarious Solo, a loving stepfather to his Hispanic wife’s daughter, worms his way into the life of the older man, who wavers between resentment, disinterest, and a grudging sort of friendship. It’s clear what the plan is for the end of the trip, and it isn’t a surprise party, but the reasons remain vague, frustrating Solo, and me.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/12/09

Sugar (***1/4)

It’s a rare sports film that doesn’t culminate in a big game. This baseball tale doesn’t even have a big game. For a player trying to make it to the major leagues, just getting to play the next game is the point. For a pitcher Miguel “Sugar” Santos (real ballplayer Algenis Perez Soto), playing the next game means being able to send money to his family in the Dominican Republic, and not having to find work in a poor country.

Writing/directing team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) follow Sugar’s attempt to beat the odds. For a Dominican it means first “graduating” from a local baseball academy before even getting a shot at the lowest minor league in the United States. Rudimentary English lessons (“home run,” “I got it,” and so on) are part of the package. But the heart of the movie is Sugar’s season in a low minor league team in rural Iowa, where Sugar becomes merely one of several promising newcomers. His character is particular, but is also meant to represent the thousands of Dominicans hoping to make it to the big leagues, most of whom will not succeed. This is also an immigrant story. Boden and Fleck handle the culture clash aspect with subtlety. The language barrier, for example, results in Sugar repeatedly ordering French toast at breakfast because he can’t read the menu. Eventually, he figures things out, but not in the way you expect.

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viewed on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 4/2/10

The Visitor (***1/4)

Character actor Richard Jenkins gives a fine performance as a middle-aged professor who, returning to his temporarily abandoned New York apartment, finds an immigrant couple living there. It’s a misunderstanding, and so accommodation, not confrontation, results.

Some aspects of United States immigration policy are depicted, but the movie doesn’t seem intended to be political. It seems at first like it’s going to be one of those dramas where the colored folks (he’s Syrian, she’s Senegalese) teach the old white dude how to be hip. The professor, a widower, discovers an unlikely affinity for African drumming and gets lessons from the younger man. But the main story is of a lonely man finding an unexpected way out of a rut. For the couple, it is a story of the fragile world some people inhabit and the tiny happenstance that turns their lives around. For writer-director Tom McCarthy, it’s the follow up to The Station Agent, another tale of disparate people coming together, although here the immigrants are secondary characters. While The Visitor lacks the humor and quirky charm of that film, there’s a similar warmness to the storytelling, and McCarthy easily avoids the sophomore slump.

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viewed 6/6/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 6/25/08

Golden Door (***1/4)

This movie is a story of immigration, told by following a peasant who travels to Ellis Island with his mother and sons. Salvatore is a widower, living in a craggy village in Sicily; like every other Italian we see in the movie, he speaks no English. He is illiterate. With (literal) visions of money growing on trees, he heads off to America, envisioning immense vegetables growing in the fertile soil. But these fantasies are as romantic as the film gets; in many ways what it made me think of was a sort of anti-Titanic. In that film, poor boy Leo DeCaprio stows away; we don’t see him stuffed like a sardine into the cots provided to the third-class passengers here. We also don’t see what would have awaited him had he made it to Ellis Island. He’d have been examined for defects mental and physical, and deported if found wanting. The Kate Winslet figure, an Englishwoman mysteriously traveling on a boat full of Italians, is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Well-dressed, carrying herself with a slightly regal air, and traveling alone, she’s the object of much speculation among the other passengers. But she too will be turned away unless she can find someone to marry her.

And there I’ve told you 80% of the plot. If a fast-paced story or conventional romance is what you’re looking for, this movie may bore you. Precise detail, from the smudged clothing and dark fingernails of the emigrants to their assembly-line processing at the end of their trip, is the movie’s forte. Writer-director Emanuele Crialese spent a year researching Ellis Island and poring over the letters of the people who passed through there. He tells the story without sentimentality, though not without tenderness. The camera work eshews grand vistas for carefully framed shots of people in close quarters. There is only a little music. The result provides a better look than any text book at what it must have been like to leave everything you’ve known and go somewhere new, what it was like to become American.

The Namesake (***1/4)

? Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) directed this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel about Bengali immigrants to the United States, with Kal Penn playing their son as an adult. The adaptation is by Sooni Taraporevala, who also scripted Nair’s breakthrough film Salaam Bombay and its follow-up, Mississippi Masala, which was her first to tackle the culture-clash themes explored here.
+ There’s something about the storytelling here that begs to be called beautiful. It’s an appealingly quiet film in which Nair’s camera carefully expresses the feelings of the characters, especially the parents. Snowy rooftops and quiet music stand for the isolation felt by the mother, who does not adapt as readily as her husband to her adopted country. The Namesake doesn’t overplay the culture-clash angle, but instead incorporates that as part of a larger story about a changing family dynamic. Even as the focus shifts to the son’s story, it reminds us that the older generation continues to experience life’s changes even as the new one grows up.
- Undoubtedly some people will find the movie slow, and the plot is by no means earth-shattering.
= ***1/4 This is in some ways an Indian story, but in more significant ways one about assimilation and family life, something like Barry Levinson’s Avalon, but less depressing and less sweeping.

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reviewed 4/6/07

Sweet Land (***)

? Suspicion and confusion greet a German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) who arrives at the end of World War I in a Minnesota farm community. Her nationality, combined with her lack of English skills, delays the wedding.

+ This is a quiet, subtle movie that’s partly about a young woman adapting to a new setting while not speaking the language, partly about a young couple’s halting courtship, and partly about what it might have been like to live in that time and place. I can’t think of another film that shows the process of learning language so well. The heroine knows no English at first (but for one comic phrase), and we watch, bit by bit, as she becomes more conversant. Reaser has to do a lot without speaking much, and she should garner some attention with her performance. The movie is beautifully shot on location in the stark Minnesota landscape.

- I’m a big fan of subtlety, but this might be too minimalist for my taste. Unless I missed it, you never really learn what led the main character to emigrate or why she became a socialist, for example. The film’s flashback structure adds little. And I thought it was a little unnatural how much the other characters speak to someone they know only speaks German.

= *** I found this story an absorbing collection of mostly small moments, but it might bore some people.